Budding
by Farla
Summary: No one would ever tell a pearl she isn't allowed to think. That would require a pearl's thoughts to matter, and they don't.


The pearl spends most of her time thinking.

No one would ever tell a pearl she isn't allowed to think. That would require a pearl's thoughts to matter, and they don't. When she is told to stand somewhere, she stands. When she is told to carry something, she carries. She is a good pearl - nothing exemplary, but then, what pearl is?

Only real gems have thoughts worthy of acting on. Since pearls are not real gems, they can only follow orders. She does what her owner says. She does what the other gems her owner meets with say. She stands perfectly still and thinks about the way the branch of the tree in front of her splits and subdivides and the bud tips that open up, how it is all like but unlike the growing of crystals she saw on the last planet and the one before last, and she thinks about hands, which it distantly resembles, and she thinks of her hands and changing them so that they split into many fingers that spread out and out and out. Real gems can do things like that.

Later, she stands perfectly still in a different location. There are bits of dry dead plants and splintered branches that cover the ground as far as she can see. The real gems talk of how wonderfully the kindergarten is coming along. The pearl does not think it's wonderful. It does not matter what the pearl thinks. She looks at her hands. She looks up at the sky and finds each distant sun she saw on the other planets she has been to. She is not sure if she would rather have never come here at all. She has plenty of time to mull it over, since it isn't as if anyone would want to know.

Later, the pearl stands and watches soldiers mock-fighting. Gems say sometimes that fighting is like a dance, but those she sees always seem graceless. If she were the one there, one who could decide to move, she would truly move - bend out of the way of that blow, spin sideways from the punch, skip over the kick and duck under the charge, leap up... She realizes she is tense with the thought of movements, her arms are shifting slightly with each blow, her legs trembling with readied energy and she realizes her error. She looks away and only listens to the thunk-thunk-thunk of the rubies hitting each other, the real gems easily weathering blows she never could. Such a worthless fighter she would be. She'd only get herself dirty and then she'd have no value at all.

Later still, she stands and watches an insect, marveling at its segments and its many tiny limbs and how it seems to flow along the ground. A gem walks by and crushes it beneath one foot. Only then does the gem notice it. She complains bitterly, trying to scrape her foot clean.

"All this gross organic goop will be gone soon enough," says her companion.

"Not soon enough," the first one says.

The pearl thinks about this the next time she watches an insect. This one is smaller and more rounded, with an iridescent shell that seems to contain every color imaginable and six delicate jointed legs. She can see the path it will take, the many feet that may crush it. She thinks she wants it to not be crushed. No one has told her this is a correct thought, one that must be acted on, but wasn't there an implied order in the complaint? She moves her foot very slowly, very slightly, and no one says anything to her so she keeps moving her foot until it nudges the beetle in the other direction. And then she stands and watches until she can't see it any longer.

She keeps nudging things for a time.

In the far corner of one of the plazas she stands on, there is a bird's nest she likes to stare at. The woven strands make her think of twined fingers cupping the eggs inside. One time, when she walks there to stand, she looks and she sees it has fallen and one of the eggs, still uncracked, has rolled out. She thinks she wants to cup it in her hands and put it back. She thinks she wants to walk over to do this. She takes a step.

Her owner asks what she's doing. She says that some gems said they didn't want to step on things like this - and if they didn't say it to her, exactly, well, people often don't really say things to her, so there's no need to clarify. Her owner says that's unnecessary and she should stop, and she grumbles to herself about how distractible and whiny some of the gems here are, but she does frown at the fallen bits and order one of the rubies to get rid of it. The pearl steps back into place.

The pearl thinks something that, if she were a real gem, would have been treasonous: she thinks that, if she belonged to the gem who had first complained, that gem would have told her to keep pushing away bugs so they wouldn't inconvenience her again. The complaining gem's companion might decide to order her to clean away everything like that, all the gross organic life, and she could walk the length of the platform and back, picking up each one in turn and moving it away so it couldn't inconvenience anyone in its death, looking at everything from new angles as she did.

And another gem might...

Not all of the gems complain about the planet. Some of them don't care. She's seen an early amethyst climbing trees, and there's a quartz who had a flower in her hair, the open petals like a cupped hand, all of the three times the pearl has seen her. A few of the thin scientists are even interested in its life. She's seen them holding bits of it, talking to each other. If she belonged to a scientist gem, which is highly improbable but not as utterly impossible as belonging to any of the quartzes here, the scientist might tell her to hold a branch or a flower - she wonders what they would feel like sometimes so much that her fingers start to twitch - or even to go get something and bring it back. One of the scientists might have liked to examine the fallen nest. The scientist might have asked her to say what she knew about it, since recording information is just another form of carrying, and she could have shown her how the two birds had flown in each strand some time ago, how they bent each fragile bit around the other until together they made something so much stronger, and perhaps the scientist would have said to put it back to see what would happen next.

No one tells her to do any of this, so she stands and stares at the sky as the smoke blows by. It's too blue right now to make out the other stars she knows.

She thinks of someone coming over and telling her to do something. She just does as she's ordered. It's not really important who gives the orders, is it? No one has ever ordered her not to take orders from someone. If someone told her to run, she could just run. She's fast, she could run faster than anyone could tell her to stop.

She stands there, still. No one tells her to run.


End file.
